All That Heaven Allows (1955)

This tragic romance of an older widow and younger -- very studly --
man is not as "weepy" as other Sirk projects, but is even more direct
in its condemnation of social codes and hypocrisy.

Jane Wyman is only eight years older than Rock Hudson here, but we are
supposed to imagine a larger gap. She has adult children and I suppose
he is supposed to be about their age, although he's been to war, has
his own business and seems more mature.

No one understands -- or will accept -- that a widow with grown
children can still feel passion. Society and town gossips conspire to
keep her from pursuing her own happiness. The kids are particularly
vile: Mom's escaping! Can't allow that!

An especially interesting aspect is how mainstream, rigid, judgmental
society is shamed in comparison to an alternative, artistic, lightly
bohemian counterculture. Who wouldn't prefer the latter to the former?
And when did this start in film? You get a touch of it with Cary Grant
and Katherine Hepburn in Holiday (1938) and Capra has an eccentric
screwball treatment in You Can't Take It With You (1938). Once we
reach the beatnik and hippy era it's all over: Hollywood rushes to
other side of the boat and the counterculture becomes mainstream.

Sirk's work was once belittled for being merely "women's" pictures,
but which seems more radical in retrospect. We are used to movies
being about men watching women, with plots made from the effect women
have on men. Sirk is able to turn it around: this is about a woman
looking at a man and her struggles with what that does to her.